Ever since Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion premiered in
London in 1914, critics and audiences have assumed that Shaw chose
the name Henry Higgins for the male lead primarily for the comic
effect produced by having the Cockney characters drop the letter
"h" that begins his Christian name and surname. However, such an
explanation ignores the crucial fact that Higgins is an Irish
surname; the name is found in all four provinces of Ireland (though
primarily in Connaught) and comes from the Irish Gaelic name Ó
hUigín, meaning "son of the Viking." Shaw was undoubtedly aware of
the name's Hibernian origins, and not simply because he was born
and raised in Dublin. By his own estimation, he knew "more about
Irish names than anyone outside the professions of land agency . .
. can possibly know"; this knowledge was gained while working in an
estate office in Dublin as a young man, in a job which required him
to "collect . . . rents from tenants in every province in Ireland"
and to enter their surnames on receipts and in ledgers. Shaw's
decision to give Higgins a name he knew to be Irish cannot be
lightly dismissed, for, as many critics have pointed out, Shaw's
character names frequently tell us something about the fictional
figures who bear them.

Shaw elected to endow his rude but winning phonetics professor
with an Irish name to signal that Higgins is an Englishman of Irish
descent. Those who watch or read Pygmalion are meant
to understand that the professor's Englishness is somewhat altered
by an outside cultural influence, which explains why he is so at
odds with the society in which he lives and why he can analyze it
so coldly and sharply. To strengthen this Irish, "outsider" aspect
of Higgins's character, Shaw also imbues the professor with many of
the traits that he repeatedly associates with a canny Irishness in
his other writings. Ultimately, the positive diasporic Irishness of
Henry Higgins helps to complicate Shaw's reputation for being
rudely dismissive of the Irish identities of those born in the
diaspora.

The main Irish aspect of Higgins's character in
Pygmalion is the fact that he is, in Shavian fashion,
a cynical fact-facer, puncturing English "sentimentality" and
"intellectual laziness" with the same pleasure as many of Shaw's
other Irish characters. When Higgins repeatedly makes incisive
speeches in support of the dignity of the individual and the need
for greater equality between social classes; when he is ruthlessly
honest in telling Eliza how she looks; and when he explodes Clara's
notion that life would be easier if everyone said exactly what they
think, he brings to mind the clear-sighted, if unpopular, analyses
enunciated by Larry Doyle and Peter Keegan in John Bull's
Other Island (1904), Sir Patrick Cullen in The
Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Mrs. Farrell in Press
Cuttings (1908), and Private O'Flaherty in O'Flaherty,
V.C (1917). Likewise, Higgins's ability to spot immediately
that Alfred Doolittle is a blackguard recalls Sir Patrick Cullen's
ability to see through "chancers" like Dubedat and corrupt surgeons
like Sir Cutler Walpole in The Doctor's Dilemma.

Perhaps the most "Irish" of Higgins's tirades in
Pygmalion are the ones in which he—like the Kerryman
Hector Malone from Man and Superman (1903)—disdains
the English for not being able to "speak [their] own language
properly." In expressing this anger, Shaw is echoing a sentiment to
be found frequently among Irish writers, who, for centuries,
delighted in puncturing the linguistic pride of their English
overlords. Maria Edgeworth suggests in the 1809 novel
Ennui that the Anglo-Irish Lady Geraldine speaks
English more precisely than her English guests, Mrs. Norton and
Lady Hauton. The Anglo-Irish characters Major Yeates and Mrs. Knox
in the Somerville and Ross story, "The Aussolas Martin Cat" (1915),
are bemused at the way the "grotesque 'stage Englishman'," Mr.
Tebbetts, drops his "h"s. And, of course, James Joyce suggests
through Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artists as a
Young Man (1916) that the best English in the world is
spoken in Lower Drumcondra on Dublin's Northside.

This pride—indeed, reverse snobbery—over the Irish...

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